Oil boom downside: Exploding trains

Text Size

-

+

reset

The disaster that devastated the town on July 6 involved a series of factors that proved fatal, dozens of times over: A 74-car train left unattended on an incline around 1 a.m., shortly after the engineer had gone to a hotel for the night. A cargo of Bakken crude oil that Canadian authorities later said was more volatile than its shipping documents indicated. And a town at the bottom of the hill, with a sharp bend in the tracks.

The train started to roll downhill, barreling at around 64 mph. Of the 47 people who died, many had been inside the Musi-Café, a bar in front of the curve where the cars flew off the track. The blasts went hundreds of feet into the air, and burning oil rolled down the streets — “like hot lava,” Tim Pellerin, a Maine fire chief who aided the response, told a U.S. Senate committee in April.

The chairman of the railroad company, Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd., later blamed the engineer for not properly setting the brakes. Canadian authorities have since filed criminal negligence charges against the engineer and two other employees, while the company declared bankruptcy and was sold off.

Eventually, oil trains may return to Lac-Mégantic, said the CEO of the Central Maine and Quebec Railway, which was buying the old railroad’s assets.

While Canadian transportation authorities haven’t finished their investigation, they have already mandated replacements or upgrades in the next three years for all older-model rail cars that haul Bakken crude. That spurred calls for U.S. DOT to follow suit.

Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche warned during a D.C. appearance in March that the accident “could have occurred anywhere.”

“Every press conference, every meeting, every question is put to me: ‘Why? Why here?’” she said in French through a translator. She added, “Action is required now, before it’s too late for other communities, other people, other grandparents, other parents, other brothers, other sisters and other children.”

Yards from disaster

In contrast, the damage in April’s crash in Lynchburg was contained to a single rail car that ruptured and caught fire. Almost all of the 17 derailed tank cars — including the one that exploded — were from a newer model, built with thicker walls and other safeguards against punctures and breaching. Nobody was injured, though that was a matter of geography and timing.

Still, the crash sent flames and smoke soaring more than 100 feet into the air.

“It was within yards of being a complete disaster,” Dave Poole, owner of a restaurant just a few feet from the crash site, said in an interview.

Investigators still haven’t determined the cause of the derailment but say the 105-car train was traveling just under the 25 mph speed limit when it went off the track, sending three cars tumbling down an embankment into the James River. Parked cars and businesses lay on the other side of the tracks.

Mayor Michael Gillette said in an interview that until the accident happened, he didn’t know the trains rolling through his city carried crude oil. Fire Chief Brad Ferguson told POLITICO he had known oil was riding that track because he had seen the placards on the trains, but he didn’t have an exact schedule.

Ferguson also thought the city had adequate preparation — including foam needed to fight petroleum fires — to handle this particular blaze. But had the problem had not been isolated to a handful of rail cars, he said, “it would have been a different story.”

The feds step in

Under Foxx, DOT’s reaction to the problem started with voluntary measures while it moved, gradually, toward a still-in-progress rule to strengthen tank car standards.

First, the department convened industry groups to agree on what they could do on their own. The voluntary steps include a 40 mph speed limit for trains hauling more than 20 tank cars of Bakken crude in “high-threat” urban areas, down from 50 mph. Railroads will also reroute some trains around particularly populated areas, and will no longer assign Bakken oil to the lowest hazard category allowed under current rules.

The agency also stepped up inspections of Bakken shipments, and has begun testing samples to try to determine whether the oil is more flammable than other types of crude. In May, DOT asked Bakken shippers to stop using the older models of railroad tank cars.

Those are “the right steps to be taking,” Foxx told POLITICO.

DOT’s mandatory measures include an emergency order requiring shippers to test the oil before sending it off, among other provisions. Another order requires railroads to inform state emergency managers about how much Bakken crude they’re transporting, how often the trains travel and the routes they follow. That information would then be available to firefighters and other first responders.

Until now, no regulations required communities to get such specific data on a regular basis, although rail companies voluntarily gave emergency agencies general information about what trains carried.

The department is also trying to craft a rule that would require even stronger tank cars for transporting crude. The proposal is expected to become public this summer, and may also address issues like speeds, routing and first responders.

The Association of American Railroads says rail companies have taken steps too, implementing nearly all the recommendations that an industry working group made in 2011, including moves toward a safer tank car standard with thicker walls and other protections. Still, as many as 228,000 older-model tank cars remain in use, with 92,000 used for hauling flammable liquids like oil. Only 14,000 of those cars are “built to the latest industry safety standards,” the AAR has estimated.

Just upgrading all the cars could cost around $1 billion, according to industry estimates. And Foxx held out the possibility that “we may have to go to a more stringent standard,” beyond what industry has agreed to.

Despite all those efforts, this past year’s oil train accidents probably won’t be the last, said Wathen, the Tuscaloosa environmentalist.

“I would be surprised if we didn’t have more of them in the very near future,” he said. “I’ve been in this environmental fight for a long, long time, man. I’ve never seen anything quite as scary as this stuff rolling through our communities.”